Comment in 150 words: Distributive Justice. (2018, 10 Marks)
Distributive justice asks what makes the allocation of a society’s benefits and burdens fair: income, wealth, offices, opportunities and honours, but also taxes and duties. The idea begins with Aristotle, who in Nicomachean Ethics Book V separated it from corrective justice: the judge restores a disturbed balance arithmetically, while the lawgiver assigns shares by proportionate equality, in ratio to merit.
Scope and criteria
Its principles are best read as moral guidance for institutions (tax, property, labour law, welfare) that decide who gets what. Any theory offering such guidance is a theory of distributive justice, whatever it calls itself: Robert Nozick objected that the term is not neutral, yet his own account answers the same question.
Scarcity makes some criterion unavoidable. David Miller, in Social Justice (1976), reduced the candidates to three:
- Rights: honour established entitlements, the logic of a settled hierarchical order.
- Desert: reward contribution and effort, the logic of market society.
- Need: meet what people require, the logic of a solidaristic community.
Utility (Jeremy Bentham) and strict equality are the other rivals; each criterion favours someone.
The main theories
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), the most influential account: equal basic liberties first; offices open under fair equality of opportunity; and inequalities allowed only if they benefit the least advantaged (the difference principle). Natural talents are morally arbitrary, so desert cannot ground shares.
- Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): justice is historical. Just acquisition, just transfer and rectification make holdings just, whatever pattern results; redistributive taxation is “on a par with forced labor”.
- Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (1983): complex equality, in which each good follows its own criterion and money must not dominate other spheres.
- Amartya Sen: the right metric is capability, since people differ in converting resources into valued lives.
The Indian anchor
The Constitution is substantive. Article 38(2) directs the state to minimise inequalities in income and endeavour to eliminate those in status, facilities and opportunities; Article 39(b)–(c) directs material resources to the common good and guards against harmful concentration of wealth. Reservation under Articles 15(4) and 16(4) sets aside formal equality to reach substantive equality. Yet in Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra (2024) a nine-judge bench held by majority that not every private resource is a “material resource of the community”. The Census 2027 caste count, the first full one since 1931, will sharpen the debate.
Conclusion
No society uses one criterion: jobs go largely by desert, healthcare by need, goods by choice. The defensible position joins Walzer’s insight to Rawls’s constraint: each good by its own criterion, and no inequality that fails to benefit the least advantaged.